The codec war is raging now more than ever before. The increased popularity of the proposed WebRTC protocol and the implied royalty costs make this a hot topic. Google, Cisco, Microsoft and now finally Apple are promoting their preferred technology and attempting to influence the choice to be made for WebRTC. The choice is far from clear especially in light of the latest technology advances, the transcoding infrastructure costs involved and the impact on mobile devices.

In his session at 1st WebRTC Summit, Soufiane Houri shared Weemo's multi-year experience developing on top of the leading video and voice codecs. He provided some perspective on the advantages of each across devices taking into account hardware and software-based video acceleration and the impact each have on the end user.

Speaker Bio Soufiane Houri is the VP of Product at Weemo where he owns product strategy and product marketing. He is setting product direction and leading development of next-generation API-centric cloud video collaboration solutions. Before joining Weemo as the first executive to establish and launch the company in the U.S., he led product management and engineering teams at Cisco Systems. For over 12 years there, he spearheaded the development of innovative hardware and software solutions in Voice and Video over IP (real-time and streaming) and Wireless. Soufiane has overseen multiple product development roadmaps and been directly involved in strategic relationships with large enterprises, telecom carriers, global call centers, systems integrators and technology partners. He holds an MBA from Babson College F.W. Olin Graduate School of Business and a dual Bachelor's of Science in Computer Information Systems and Management from the University of Massachusetts.

A Rock Star Faculty, Top Keynotes, Sessions, and Top Delegates!Cloud Expo® 2014 New York, June 10-12, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.

The growth and success of Cloud Computing will be on display at the upcoming Cloud Expo® conference and exhibition at the Javits Center in New York City, N.Y., June 10-12, 2014.

All main layers of the Cloud ecosystem will be represented at the 14th International Cloud Expo® - the infrastructure players, the platform providers, and those offering applications, and they'll all be here to speak, sponsor, exhibit and network.

Sponsorship Opportunities for Cloud Expo® 2014 New YorkCloud Expo® 2014 New York "show prospectus" has shipped. Sponsorship, exhibit, and keynote opportunities can be obtained from Carmen Gonzalez by email at events (at) sys-con.com, or by phone 201 802-3021.

Early Bird Registration Options for Cloud Expo® 2014 New YorkCloud Expo® delegates can pre-register for Cloud Expo® New York with $500+ savings here.

Shipping daily, injecting faults, and keeping an extremely high availability "without Ops"? Understand why NoOps does not mean no operations. Agile development methodologies require evolved operations to be successful.
[continued]

Speaker Bio: David's mission is to "put more Ops into DevOps". He currently shares "the good news" of software and has helped customers since 2007 as a Technical Evangelist at Microsoft. David creates technical content including hundreds of videos, speaks at various Microsoft and industry-sponsored events, leads the weekly Edge Show with monthly episodes on DevOps, and works directly with customers and internal development teams. DevOps is currently David's focus which includes expertise in relevant products such as Microsoft Azure, Visual Studio Online, Application Insights, Team Foundation Server, Release Management, and System Center. [continued]

Interoperable WebRTC and Why It Is Important
By Peter Dunkley

There are many potential applications for WebRTC and for many interoperability is not a requirement. However, this does not mean that there is not a need for interoperability, particularly at the signaling level, for other applications.

Many people have dismissed interoperability as a consideration when using WebRTC - often due to the fact that their favoured use-cases do not require it (and in some cases are even hampered by it). In his session at 2nd WebRTC Summit, Peter Dunkley, Technical Director, at Crocodile RCS, will look at the other side and discuss the case for interoperability and explain how WebRTC can be used to enhance and extend existing services in a way provides benefits to service providers and their customers.

He will conclude with a look at some of the open-source options available today for building interoperable WebRTC applications.
[continued]

Speaker Bio: Peter Dunkley is Technical Director at Acision. He graduated from The University of Edinburgh in 2000 with a BSc (Hons) in Computer Science. After graduation Peter worked on a PSTN switch developing signalling stacks for SS7, ISDN and similar protocols and creating advanced routing and service applications. Since 2005 he has worked mainly with SIP first leading a team developing a PSTN gateway and then managing the development of a SIP Application Server. Peter joined Crocodile RCS in September 2010 and has made numerous contributions to the Kamailio open source SIP Router project (particularly in the areas of presence, WebSocket, MSRP, and SIP Outbound) since then. Peter is one of the authors of the MSRP over WebSocket draft (draft-pd-dispatch-msrp-websocket) and is a contributor to several open-source projects.
[continued]

Is WebRTC a Second Stage Engine in the Telehealth Rocket?
By
Ivelin Ivanov

Telehealth legislation opened the floodgates for investment in modern communications services and APIs since 2010. WebRTC promises a second revolution. Ivelin Ivanov will discuss a real-world example where telephony APIs make a difference in improving patient care and reducing healthcare costs. He will then look into a brighter telehealth future with secure, high quality, ubiquitous WebRTC video interactions.
[continued]

Speaker Bio: Ivelin Ivanov is a technology entrepreneur who founded Mobicents, an Open Source VoIP Platform, to help create, deploy, and manage applications integrating voice, video and data. He is the co-founder of TeleStax, an Open Source Cloud Communications company that helps the shift from legacy IN/SS7 telco networks to IP-based cloud comms. An early investor in multiple start-ups, he still finds time to code for his companies and contribute to open source projects.
[continued]

Matrix: the missing signaling layer for WebRTC?By Mathew Hodgson

WebRTC defines no default signaling protocol, causing fragmentation between WebRTC silos. SIP and XMPP provide possibilities, but come with considerable complexity and are not designed for use in a web environment. Matrix is a new non-profit Open Source Project that defines both a new HTTP-based standard for VoIP & IM signaling and provides reference implementations. [continued]

Speaker Bio:Matthew Hodgson is technical co-founder of the Matrix.org: a not-for-profit organization focused on solving the problem of fragmentation in current VoIP and IP Messaging applications. By defining a new lightweight pragmatic open standard for federation and interoperability and releasing opensource reference implementations, Matrix hopes to create a new ecosystem that makes real-time-communication as universal and interoperable as email. [continued]

WebRTC and the Customer Experience
By Keith McFarlane

In this session, Keith McFarlane, Chief Technology Officer, Cloud Platforms & Telephony at LiveOps, will share how WebRTC technology is truly the next stage in the globalization of the contact center, especially in the areas of monetization and creating a superior, personalized customer experience.

Over the past few years, the importance of a positive customer experience has risen and solidified itself as a major differentiation for brands. Meaning, companies today have to offer great service along with their products. WebRTC communications, combined with the cloud and building upon the foundation provided by VoIP and the Internet, is making a single network a reality by eliminating the need for the expensive servers, software, landlines and phones required by traditional contact center technologies. Customer service agents with WebRTC-enabled devices will be able to provide better customer experiences across all channels – including voice – and contact centers will continue to become even more streamlined, cost-efficient and productive than ever before.
[continued]

Speaker Bio: At LiveOps, Keith McFarlane holds the role of Chief Technology Officer, Cloud Platform & Telephony. He has more than 20 years of experience designing and developing large-scale customer service solutions and CRM systems. He is an expert on the benefits of cloud computing technology for both enterprise and SMBs and was named to ExecRank's "Top CTO Rankings" list for 2012.

Prior to LiveOps, McFarlane worked for an on-premise contact center provider that is currently ranked number two among the top contact centers worldwide. It was there that he first began to realize the potential impact that cloud computing could have on the decades-old customer service contact center industry. He also realized that a software and hardware laden provider, such as his previous employer, would be challenged to move quickly into the cloud space. Making the move to LiveOps gave him the opportunity to be part of the team that developed the true cloud LiveOps Platform for enterprise use. Twelve years ago the LiveOps Platform was created for use only by the LiveOps community of 20,000 independent contractors to grow LiveOps' agent services business. In 2008, when McFarlane arrived at the company, LiveOps began evolving the platform for individual sale and use by other companies with their own agents. Under McFarlane's guidance, LiveOps is continuing to make industry-firsts, including the first fully integrated multichannel plus social agent desktop.
[continued]

How the Norwegian Red Cross built a video tutoring solution with WebRTC
By Svein Willassen

This is the story about how the Norwegian Red Cross used WebRTC to build a service that allow high school student to meet volunteer tutors and get help with their school assignments just by visiting a web page in their browser. The solution has greatly increased the reach of the tutoring service run by the Red Cross, allowing students to get the help they need without leaving their homes.
[continued]

Speaker Bio: Svein Willassen is the founder and CTO of the leading WebRTC based video conferencing service appear.in. he is currently leading the on-going development of that service. Svein has a PhD in forensic computing and has worked extensively with forensic analysis of communication systems as well as development of communication services.
[continued]

Visualizing WebRTC: A Social Experiment with Meta-Networking
By Sara Robertson

On her social media platform Melodramatic.com, with global reach and over 1,000 uniques daily, Sara Robertson released a WebRTC network that created a peer-to-peer connection between every visitor on every page load. Geographical location data and round-trip data transfer rates of each connection is collected, and augmented with known demographics about the visitors. Static assets are randomly selected for serving directly through this new meta-network, and user experience is carefully measured. When rendered in a real-time visualization, this data provides exciting insights into the limitations and potential for WebRTC as it applies to modern web infrastructures.
[continued]

Speaker Bio: Sara is a technology generalist with experience in large platform implementations, high-scale/low-latency serving, cloud infrastructures, and big data strategies. She is VP of Technology for an online advertising company serving billions of impressions daily, and runs a social media website (melodramatic.com) that she uses as a playground for technical experimentation.
[continued]

WebRTC – The SKYPE Killer and Cloud UC Enabler
By Vishal Brown

While affordable and convenient, Skype is not an acceptable platform for business communications. While it may suffice for personal use and even SMBs, enterprise organizations need more substantial services with the quality, security and interoperability to handle video conferencing smoothly around the globe. Contrarily, WebRTC has the potential to overcome the incompatibility issues that have plagued the UC market for many years, and now that the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) is driving the audio and video codec standards, they've already ratified the audio standards (i.e. Opus), and they're getting close to choosing the video standard - this is going to be big deal for UC this year.
[continued]

Speaker Bio: Vishal has over 15 years of experience in focusing large enterprises on the key initiatives needed to improve communication within their organization. This includes not just implementing unified communication solutions, but also thought leadership and strategic planning, policies and procedures to make the initiative effective.
[continued]

The Promise of a Paradigm Shift in B2C Customer Communications
By Tobias Goebel

WebRTC promises to make realtime communications so ubiquitous that whole new ways of how consumers interact with businesses, or with fellow consumers of the same business, will emerge. Outside of the RTC world, innovative companies like Amazon are already offering ways for customers to help themselves, or others. WebRTC will accelerate this trend. It will also impact the way how and when consumers reach out to the contact center, and vice versa. In this talk I will share ideas on what this paradigm shift in B2C customer communications will mean for the customer on the one hand, and the contact center on the other.
[continued]

Speaker Bio: Tobias has over 10 years of experience in the IVR and contact center industry. As part of Aspect's product management and marketing team today, he works on defining the future of the mobile customer experience, which will incorporate channels such as mobile apps, SMS, voice, chat, social, and will address the customer holistically, taking the SoLoMoClo (Social, Local, Mobile, Cloud) trend into account. Tobias holds degrees in Computational Linguistics, Phonetics, and Computer Science from the universities of Bonn, Germany and Edinburgh, UK.
[continued]

Cultural, regulatory, environmental, political and economic (CREPE) conditions over the past decade are creating cross-industry solution spaces that require processes and technologies from both the Internet of Things (IoT), and Data Management and Analytics (DMA). [continued]

Speaker Bio:
Joseph di Paolantonio began working with IoT data in 2000 when his consultancy and system integration firm partnered with RFID companies to integrate RFID data with other supply chain data in data warehouses and include such data in Business Intelligence solutions. [continued]

New business opportunities for real time communications created by the IoT explosion
By Ivelin Ivanov

From telemedicine to smart cars, digital homes and industrial monitoring, the explosive growth of IoT has created exciting new business opportunities for real time calls and messaging. This presentation will share some of the new revenue sources that IoT created for Restcomm - the open source telephony platform from Telestax. [continued]

Speaker Bio:Ivelin Ivanov is a technology entrepreneur who founded Mobicents, an Open Source VoIP Platform, to help create, deploy, and manage applications integrating voice, video and data. He is the co-founder of TeleStax, an Open Source Cloud Communications company that helps the shift from legacy IN/SS7 telco networks to IP-based cloud comms. An early investor in multiple start-ups, he still finds time to code for his companies and contribute to open source projects [continued]

Modern Telecom and the IoT
By Evan McGee

The worldwide cellular network will be a a backbone in the future IoT, and telecom industry is clamoring to get on board as more than just a data pipe. What can service operators offer, however, that would benefit IoT entrepreneurs, inventors, and consumers? [continued]

Speaker Bio:Evan McGee is the CTO of RingPlus, a leading innovative U.S. MVNO and wireless enabler. His focus is on combining web technologies with traditional telecom to create a new breed of unified communication that is easily accessible to the general consumer. With over a decade of experience in telecom and associated technologies, Evan is demonstrating the power of OSS to further human and machine-to-machine innovation. [continued]

WebRTC + IoT = Personalized Customer Service
By Peter Cornelius

Can call centers hang up the phones for good? Intuitive Solutions did. WebRTC enabled this contact center provider to eliminate antiquated telephony and desktop phone infrastructure with a pure web-based solution, allowing them to expand beyond brick-and-mortar confines to a home-based agent model. It also ensured scalability and better service for customers, including MUY! Companies, one of the country's largest franchise restaurant companies with 232 Pizza Hut locations. This is one example of WebRTC adoption today, but the potential is limitless when powered by IoT . Attendees will learn real-world benefits of WebRTC and explore future possibilities, as WebRTC and IoT intersect to improve customer service. [continued]

Speaker Bio:Peter Cornelius has spent the past 15 years designing and building large scale enterprise applications, predominantly focused on the call center space. In his role as Solution Architect at LiveOps he has designed and built platform components to allow the doubling of the number of registered agents along with dramatic improvements in stability and performance. He is currently working on the next generation of the LiveOps platform. [continued]

Spatial Teleconferencing With WebRTC
By Alan Kraemer

While great strides have been made relative to the video aspects of remote collaboration, audio technology has basically stagnated. Typically all audio is mixed to a single monaural stream and emanates from a single point, such as a speakerphone or a speaker associated with a video monitor. [continued]

Speaker Bio:Alan Kraemer (CTO) has over 29 years of experience in a wide range of technology based fields. As Vice President of Engineering for Technology Marketing Inc., he and his team created the architecture for and designed a wide variety of computers and computer based products for major corporations including British Telecomms and Litton Industries. [continued]

The Industrial Internet and the Cloud: Challenges in the Road Ahead
By Dave Duggal

The Industrial Internet revolution is now underway, enabled by connected machines and billions of devices that communicate and collaborate. The massive amounts of Big Data requiring real-time analysis is flooding legacy IT systems and giving way to Cloud environments that can handle the unpredictable workloads. Yet many barriers remain until we can fully realize the opportunities and benefits from the convergence of machines & devices with Big Data and the Cloud, including interoperability, data security and privacy. This session will focus on public-private work being done today to identify the IoT standards, architecture, frameworks and security needed to enable and accelerate the $32 trillion opportunity ahead. [continued]

Speaker Bio:
Dave founded EnterpriseWeb LLC (www.enterpriseweb.com) in 2009. EnterpriseWeb® is an application platform for dynamic, data-driven applications and processes. Dave is a proven business leader who has made a career of building, growing and turning around companies and is a proponent of next generation 'smart' business processes. [continued]

Time Series Data in a Time Series World
By Jim Scott

The Internet-of-Things is tied together with a thin strand that is known as time. Coincidentally, at the core of nearly all data analytics is a timestamp. When working with time series data there are a few core principles that everyone should consider, especially across datasets where time is the common boundary. Single-value, geo-spatial, and log time series data will be discussed. By focusing on enterprise applications and the data center OpenTSDB will be used as an example to explain some of these concepts including when to use different storage models. [continued]

Speaker Bio:Jim has held positions running Operations, Engineering, Architecture and QA teams in the Consumer Packaged Goods, Digital Advertising, Digital Mapping, Chemical and Pharmaceutical industries. Jim has built systems that handle more than 50 billion transactions per day and his work with high-throughput computing at Dow Chemical was a precursor to more standardized big data concepts like Hadoop. [continued]

The Edison Moment for the Internet of Me
By Abe Gong

Trick question: What did Thomas Edison do for the lightbulb?
He didn't invent it—working lightbulbs existed in laboratories for 80 years before Edison arrived. Instead, Edison's team made electric light scalable. They turned a theoretical possibility into a daily, lived reality—for billions of people. [continued]

Speaker Bio:
Abe was the first data scientist at Jawbone and the lead data scientist at Massive Health, where he built data systems to nudge people to form good habits and live healthier. He earned his PhD in Public Policy, Political Science, and Complex Systems at the University of Michigan. All told, Abe has worked as data scientist/statistical consultant in education, health, and public policy for over a decade. In previous lives, Abe has been a pollster, journalist, refugee, and amateur historian. He is now working on a stealth startup using connected devices to improve habits and relationships. [continued]

Manage Your Mesh
By Ryan Bagnulo

Code Halos – aka "digital fingerprints" - are the key organizing principle to understand a) how dumb things become smart and b) how to monetize this dynamic. In this session Ben Pring, Co-Director of Cognizant's Center for the Future of Work, will outline research, analysis and recommendations from his recently published book on this phenomena on the way leading edge organizations like GE and Disney are unlocking the IoT opportunity and what steps your organization should be taking to position itself for the next platform of digital competition. [continued]

Speaker Bio:
Robert H. Brown is the global head of Cognizants CFoW market strategy and outreach for Business Process Services. He is specifically focused on Cognizant BPS thought leadership, brand development, and solutions orchestration, as well as collaboration with Cognizant senior executive clients and prospects. He resides in California.
[continued]

Identity Management and WebRTC By Peter Dunkley

We are reaching the end of the beginning with WebRTC and real systems using this technology have begun to appear. One challenge that faces every WebRTC deployment (in some form or another) is identity management. For example, if you have an existing service - possibly built on a variety of different PaaS/SaaS offerings - and you want to add real-time communications you are faced with a challenge relating to user management, authentication, authorisation, and validation. Service providers will want to use their existing identities, but these will have credentials already that are (hopefully) irreversibly encoded. This presentation looks at how this identity problem can be solved and discusses ways to use existing web identities for real-time communication. [continued]

Speaker Bio:
Peter is Technical Director at Acision. He graduated from The University of Edinburgh in 2000 with a BSc (Hons) in Computer Science. After graduation Peter worked on a PSTN switch developing signalling stacks for SS7, ISDN and similar protocols and creating advanced routing and service applications. [continued]

WebRTC and Data Channels; the Innovation Within Disruption
By Alex Gouaillard

As a disruptive technology, Web Real-Time Communication (WebRTC), which is an emerging standard of web communications, is redefining how brands and consumers communicate in real time. The on-going narrative around WebRTC has largely been around incorporating video, audio and chat functions to apps. Alex will look at a fourth element - data channels - and talk about its potential to move WebRTC beyond browsers and into the internet of things. [continued]

Speaker Bio:
A Frenchman who has relocated to Singapore, Alex is regarded as one of the pioneers of Web Real-Time Communication (WebRTC). He is a member of the W3C and IETF (which create and define the standards of this technology), and is an active participant in key WebRTC working groups and task forces. Alex holds two PhDs from INSA, France, and KEIO University, Japan. He has deep experience in communications, signal and image processing, and has established and led successful research groups at Caltech, Harvard, A*STAR. Alex was also involved in several innovative startups in Europe, North America, and APAC. [continued]

Sponsorship opportunities are now open for WebRTC Summit 2015 New York, June 9-11, 2015, at the Javits Center, and for WebRTC Summit 2015 Silicon Valley, November 3–5, 2015, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA. For sponsorship, exhibit opportunities and show prospectus, please contact Carmen Gonzalez, carmen (at) sys-con.com.

SYS-CON Media has a flourishing Media Partner program in which mutually beneficial promotion and benefits are arranged between our own leading Enterprise IT portals and events and those of our partners.

If you would like to participate, please provide us with details of your website/s and event/s or your organization and please include basic audience demographics as well as relevant metrics such as ave. page views per month.

SYS-CON Events announced today that WHOA.com, an ISO 27001 Certified secure cloud computing company, has been named “Bronze Sponsor” of SYS-CON's 16th International Cloud Expo® New York, which will take place June 9-11, 2015, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.
WHOA.com is a leader in next-generation, ISO 27001 Certified secure cloud solutions. WHOA.com offers a comprehensive portfolio of best-in-class cloud services for business including Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Secure Cloud Desktop, Cloud Storage, Disaster Recovery, Integrated Applications and Security.

OmniTI has expanded its services to help customers automate their processes to deliver high quality applications to market faster.
Consistent with its focus on IT agility and quality, OmniTI operates under DevOps principles, exploring the flow of value through the IT delivery process, identifying opportunities to eliminate waste, realign misaligned incentives, and open bottlenecks. OmniTI takes a unique, value-centric approach by plotting each opportunity in an effort-payoff quadrant, then working with customers to focus on initiatives with high payoff and low effort – using its deep bench of...

In recent years, we’ve watched mobile, cloud technologies and Internet of Things (IoT) enable increased connectivity for every network and every industry, ranging from connected cars to commercial vehicles and fleet management to smart cities to data centers. At MWC, it was clear that professionals in these areas are continuing to make strides in their fields. Below are a few of the major developments we noticed and look forward to hearing more as 2015 progresses.

DevOps is all the rage these days and with good reason as it promises to reduce the time-to-market for new applications. It also promises to improve change management, allowing teams to deploy changes to their applications quickly and efficiently. However, DevOps isn’t something you buy, install, or implement; rather it is the symptom of an appropriate organizational system.
In his session at DevOps Summit, Mark Thiele, EVP, Data Center Technologies at SUPERNAP International, will discuss how to get to the right organizational model that will allow DevOps practices to flourish.

When it comes to microservices there are myths and uncertainty about the journey ahead. Deploying a “Hello World” app on Docker is a long way from making microservices work in real enterprises with large applications, complex environments and existing organizational structures. February 19, 2015 10:00am PT / 1:00pm ET → 45 Minutes Join our four experts: Special host Gene Kim, Gary Gruver, Randy Shoup and XebiaLabs’ Andrew Phillips as they explore the realities of microservices in today’s IT world:

You deployed an app. Nothing has changed in three days, but it suddenly crashes. Why? Memory leak.
You deployed an app. Nothing has changed in three weeks, but it suddenly stops working. Why? A database query came back empty and the web application freaked out trying manipulate a null value, deciding instead to just stop in its track and return nothing.
You deployed a load balancing service. Nothing has changed in three months, but it suddenly stopped load balancing your app. Why? One of the ports on an intermediate switch decided to fry. Literally. It's a black hole and the load balancer ...

This month I want to revisit supporting infrastructure and datacenter environments. I have touched (some would say rant) upon this topic since my post in April 2014 called "Take a Holistic View of Support". My thoughts and views on this topic have not changed at all: it's critical for any organization to have a holistic, comprehensive strategy and view of how they support their IT infrastructure and datacenter environments. In fact, I believe it's even more critical today then it was a year ago when I wrote that blog post.
We work with many different organizations in many different types of i...

It's spring in the Northeast, and this week we're launching a new blog post series, "Everything You Want to Know about Windows Server 2003 Migration." Why a series of posts on WS2003? Even as summer and EOS is just months away, our "State of Readiness for Windows Server 2003 End of Support" survey reveals the shocking truth: most of you haven't done anything about remediation yet, and most will not complete your upgrades before the deadline.

SYS-CON Events announced today the IoT Bootcamp – Jumpstart Your IoT Strategy, being held June 9–10, 2015, in conjunction with 16th Cloud Expo and Internet of @ThingsExpo at the Javits Center in New York City. This is your chance to jumpstart your IoT strategy.
Combined with real-world scenarios and use cases, the IoT Bootcamp is not just based on presentations but includes hands-on demos and walkthroughs. We will introduce you to a variety of Do-It-Yourself IoT platforms including Arduino, Raspberry Pi, BeagleBone, Spark and Intel Edison. You will also get an overview of cloud technologies s...

While recently attending a Dynatrace User Group in Hartford, I had the opportunity to sit in on a great presentation from a leading US insurance company as they explained their three-year APM journey. I see a lot of these success stories, but this one was especially impressive. To see how they have refined their internal processes, successes and performance best practices to ensure delivery of high quality, high performing and highly scalable applications over these years.
The performance engineering group within the large US insurance company was the one that started adopting application per...

Microservice architectures are the new hotness, even though they aren't really all that different (in principle) from the paradigm described by SOA (which is dead, or not dead, depending on whom you ask). One of the things this decompositional approach to application architecture does is encourage developers and operations (some might even say DevOps) to re-evaluate scaling strategies. In particular, the notion is forwarded that an application should be built to scale and then infrastructure should assist where necessary.

Keeping data from getting out into the wild or being damaged by cyber attackers is what keeps CISOs, the executive team and boards of directors up at night. To protect organizations, cybersecurity needs to be automated and real-time, it needs to learn contextually like we do and it needs to monitor every corner of the network in a way that organizations can afford without sacrificing coverage.

Even though it’s now Microservices Journal, long-time fans of SOA World Magazine can take comfort in the fact that the URL – soa.sys-con.com – remains unchanged. And that’s no mistake, as microservices are really nothing more than a new and improved take on the Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) best practices we struggled to hammer out over the last decade. Skeptics, however, might say that this change is nothing more than an exercise in buzzword-hopping. SOA is passé, and now that people are talking about microservices instead, let’s switch out the terminology.

Right off the bat, Newman advises that we should "think of microservices as a specific approach for SOA in the same way that XP or Scrum are specific approaches for Agile Software development". These analogies are very interesting because my expectation was that microservices is a pattern. So I might infer that microservices is a set of process techniques as opposed to an architectural approach. Yet in the book, Newman clearly includes some elements of concept model and architecture as well as process and organization.

Our guest on the podcast this week is Jesse Proudman, Founder and CTO of Bluebox. We discuss Walmart’s recent OpenStack success story and the expanding capabilities of DIY private clouds. While DIY private clouds require large investments in configuring open source software to meet business needs, they can have several advantages over managed services alternatives. Listen in to learn how a DIY model could make or break private cloud deployment.